5 Responses

Re: MS and FF: I don’t allow any .NET access on any of my computers. Period. I find it offensive that MS would not only sneak this one it, but then make it almost impossible to disable. Maybe I won’t be using Bing, after all. Ugh.

Re: Palm Pre: You can almost hear the crowd: Uh, Oh, OH! Awwwww….. It’s almost like listening to a deflating balloon. Bummer. Hopefully there’s some promise there.

That Palm Pre article has about 300 reader comments in less than 24 hours. There must be a lot of interest in the Pre.

I’m dubious about the tiny keyboard and battery life. With multiple apps running it seems like it will have to be a battery hog. Wondering if you’ll need to turn off key features to get decent battery life.

I can’t type very fast on any cell phone keyboard whether physical or touch screen. The keys are just too small and too close together. When I first got my iPhone I couldn’t type more than three or four words without an error. However, my ability to hit the right key improved over time and I would now rate it about even with the Blackberry for typing speed and accuracy.

The big news (for me) is that the next release of Apple’s iPhone firmware will make the horizontal or landscape keyboard available for all apps including mail. The keys will be so much larger that I’m virtually certain this will be better for emails, etc. than having a tiny physical keyboard.

Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian and other smartphone OSes support the running of multiple apps, and many of them have BETTER battery life than the iPhone (MUCH better, in many cases). The ability to run multiple apps at once doesn’t guarantee battery drainage, depending on what those apps are doing.

Dwight – You are correct in that an application that is open in the background but not doing anything won’t add to battery drain. But it’s not giving the user any benefits either.

The apps that make sense for background processing, such as a live chat client, Skype, real-time stock quotes, etc. would be consuming energy that’s in addition to the energy being consumed by the foreground app.

Look what happens to battery life now (with the iPhone) when you turn on push notifications and sync four or five active email accounts in the background.